Ophthalmic surgeons often rely on surgical microscopes during ophthalmic surgical procedures to see fine details of a patient's eye. One class of ophthalmic surgeries, the vitreo-retinal procedure, involves vitrectomy, the removal of the vitreous body from the posterior chamber to access the retina. The successful execution of vitrectomy requires an essentially complete removal of the vitreous, including the most challenging regions near the vitreous base. Due to the transparent nature of the vitreous, performing a vitrectomy relying on only a conventional surgical microscope for visualization may be challenging.
To assist in visualization, surgeons may rely on pre-surgical optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. OCT imaging is a technique that enables visualization of the target tissue in depth by focusing a laser beam onto the target, collecting the reflected beam, interfering the reflected beam with a reference beam and detecting the interference, and measuring the reflectance signature within the depth of focus of the beam. The result is a line scan in depth, a cross-sectional scan, or a volumetric scan. During a surgical procedure, a surgeon may reference the previously-generated OCT scan to assist in visualization. However, systems providing real-time, intra-surgical OCT imaging to assist in visualization remain lacking.